Research design for Biomedical Science

Learning Outcome 1: Define a research question based on a critical review of current scientific literature
Learning Outcome 2: Design relevant methods, with consideration of ethics and health and safety, to address the hypothesis
Learning Outcome 3: Identify appropriate data analysis approaches, including the selection of suitable statistical tests.
Learning Outcome 4: Identify potential economic, societal and commercial applications of research projects, including awareness of intellectual property rights.

Task - Research project proposal and submission of ethics application

Assessment task:

Your proposal is composed of the literature reviewand the experimental design. Within these two sections you will need to complete the following sub-sections, a template will be provided to you to complete to support your submission.

Literature Review

Summary (approx. 200 words)

This should be a brief lay summary of the background for the proposed project
Rationale/justification for the project (approx. 600 - 800 words)
Your project should be informed by published work therefore in this section you should be using scientific papers to document both the reasoning for the project but also for the methods being proposed. Within thissection youshould alsoconsider the wider societal and economicimplications of your project.

Aims and objectives (approx. 50 - 100 words)
The aim should state what you ultimately want to find out at the end of your project, objectives are the experiments/steps that you will need to carry out to fulfil the aim.

Hypothesis/Research Question (approx. 200 words)
Information from your literature review will provide evidence, which supports the predicted outcome of your aim. For some projects, it may not be appropriate to state a hypothesis, in this case, your research question should be clearly defined.

Experimental design (approx. 800 words)
This should provide a clear plan of how you will collect the data for your project. There should be sufficient detail as to how experiments will be carried out so that when you begin to conduct your experiments, you can go into the lab and do this independently based on the information you have provided in the proposal.

Ethical/Health and Safety Considerations
Consideration of ethical and health and safety issues should be clearly stated as part of the experimental design.

Data Analysis
How data will be analysed and any statistical tests whichwill be used should also be included within this section.
Time Plan (not included in the word count)
You also need to include a time plan which provides an overview of how you will structure your data collection

Ethics and COSHH
Ethics and COSHH submission are a formal part of the project proposal. Ethics applications and associated COSHH/risk assessments must be submitted to the online ethics system for your project supervisor to review, by the submission deadline for the proposal. You do not need to have final approval by this deadline but your application must be under review at this point and submitted to the system. You must have final ethical approval for your project by 16th January 2023, you will not be able to start any data collection for your project (6042BMS) unless you have ethical approval, you cannot have extensions to yourdata collection period due to late ethical approval.

It you are unable to collect any data you will not be able to complete your thesis which wouldmean you would fail the 6042BMS module.